The Book to Come

The project The Book to Come is developed as part of Corpus, network for performance practice, in collaboration with book designer Filiep Tacq between 2015 and 2017. It is based on five books by Marcel Broodthaers, which the artist conceived as autonomous artworks, and aims to explore the book as a living entity. A book is made up of printed sheets of paper bound into a volume, and is a stable object, not inert matter; something living, a place for producing lived experience. It holds spaces, times and movements waiting to be activated.

The five books the project will take as its starting point are: Pense-Bête (1963-1964), Un coup de dés jamais n´abolira le hazard (1969), MTL (1970-1972), Un voyage on mer du nord (1973) y L’Angelus de Daumier (1975). Each of these touch on aspects of books, such as how they relate to other art forms (sculpture, poetry, exhibitions, film, painting) or the production processes involved in making them (technical, material, institutional, negotiation with others).

The title of the project alludes to a chain of citation. The Book to Come takes its name from a book by Maurice Blanchot from 1959 (Le Livre à venir), which revolves around another book by Stéphane Mallarmé, Un coup de dés jamais n´abolira le hazard (1914). Broodthaers responded to Mallarmé in 1969 with a work by the same title. Jacques Derrida, in his 1997 lecture “The Book to Come” proposed we consider the future of the printed object at a time when technological developments were announcing profound changes in our ways of reading and writing.

Decades later these changes are fully underway, and the project The Book to Come aims to explore the performativity of books. Some of the issues we will consider are the relationship between reading and writing, image and text, matter and the immaterial, the living and the inert. We also wish to question the idea of the future the project refers to: any book is by nature a stable object, perpetually awaited, perpetually awaiting; always to come.

This project began at Bulegoa z/b with a reading group whose sessions were held between April 2015 and March 2107. Four artists, all of them members of the group, were invited to produce works in dialogue with the project’s contents. At the same time, The Book to Come reading group was set up at the CAC, Vilnius. In November 2017, Playground Festival hosted Israel Galván, Pedro G. Romero and Filiep Tacq’s performance Una tirada de dados… which was produced as part of The Book to Come.